This was a great book to use because it tied into our Social Studies unit. The pictures and informational text features provide lots of information and gave the kids lots of good ideas to put into a Prezi.

Prezi is REALLY easy and super fun to use, but spend some time playing with it before the lesson and see how it 'plays' or focuses on the different bubbles as a presentation. Here are 2 examples (they're only screenshots - they don't move around like real prezis) that I created about Abraham Lincoln and a book that we were reading in about 5 minutes. Creating the presentations works a little different on a laptop than an iPad, so familiarize yourself with the technology that you'll be using. In this lesson, you'll be demonstrating and working with kids to create a group prezi. The second graders are not really independent enough to use this site independently. It requires an understanding of the topic and how its organized, as well as the ability to move around and create new detail boxes. My goal was to help them understand the ideas can be organized and presented in a unique way.

'Citizenship' title.docx

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Citizenship.png

Get Excited!

5 minutes

Underlined words below are lesson vocabulary words that are emphasized and written on sentence strips for my Reading & Writing word wall. I pull off the words off the wall for each lesson, helping students understand this key 'reading and writing' vocabulary can be generalized across texts and topics. The focus on acquiring and using these words is part of a shift in the Common Core Standards towards building students’ academic vocabulary. My words are color coded ‘pink’ for literature/’blue’ for reading strategies/’orange’ for informational text/'yellow' for writing/’green’ for all other words)

Common starting point

"We have used the imaging strategy a lot with informational text. It helps us to be 'active readers' and organize information so we can understand and remember better."

"We'll be finding main ideas and details in our text today. Look over the informational text features that I listed. Do you remember what they are?" (Take a moment and review if necessary.)

Students need to be explicitly taught what the text features are, especially in informational text. Second graders tend to skim over the captions, lists, diagrams, and bold words because attending to these features means they have to switch gears mentally to do so, which is difficult and not what they're used to. However, not attending to the wealth of meaning that they offer to the readers means that they miss out on important ideas and clues about the main idea of the text. The Common Core Standards encourage us, as teachers, to spend time discussing these features, modeling our thinking as we examine them ("Oh, here's a list - let me see what it shows me..."), so students make a habit of looking at these features to gain information in a text. (RI.2.5)

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Teacher's Turn

15 minutes

Introduce the task

"I brought this informational text because it has ideas about the Social Studies topic we are discussing. There are LOTS of ideas, so it would really help if you use imagery to organize the information."

"We'll read through the book first and think about the image we could create so we can decide what kind of Prezi to use. When we use imaging with informational text, we need to understand the whole process before we visualize. I'll read the whole book - listen and create an image in your mind."

Read the book to the class and discuss how to organize the ideas. Ask the students what informational text features show the main ideas (headings) and what show the details (diagrams, diagram, bold words).

"I'll read the last section again to refresh your memory and then you need to make an organizer. Think about what the main idea is and that the details are." We made a list of citizenship ideas on the whiteboard.

Going back to the text for details is really one of the important points of this lesson. The Common Core Standards shift the focus of teacher led prompting toward student led discovery. The ability of students to create an image that describes a connection between concepts (RI.2.3) allows them to find how concepts are related by returning to the book - what did the text say? was there a picture that can help me?

There are some difficult concepts in this lesson and I did prompt some of my students quite a bit. I would pair up those with language difficulties with a partner to work as a team and create a prezi together.

Those with higher language should be able to add more phrases that are beyond the text. Set that expectation early with them. "Some of you may copy the words from the text (born in the U.S.), but others should be able to give me more information." (People who are born in the U.S. are naturalized citizens.)